

JOSHUA TREES 

FREDERICK MORTIMER CLAPP 





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JOSHUA TREES 



JOSHUA TREES 



BY 



FREDERICK MORTIMER CLAPP 




BOSTON 
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 

1922 



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By the Same Author 



POETRY 

On the Overland 

New York and Other Verses 

PROSE 

Les dessins de Pontormo 

Jacopo Carucci 

History of 17th Aero Squadrok 



Copyright, 1922, by 

Marshall Jones Company 

Printed in the United States of America 



DEC -4 '22 

CU692231 



CONTENTS 

Page 

Bloom on the Desert's Edge 3 

Archeology 4 

Still Life 5 

Contact 6 

Venetian Gulls 7 

The Monkey Cage 9 

California; The Hills of Bolinas 11 

Crucifixion 12 

Arizona 13 

Revulsion 14 

Cuckoos 15 

Quince Blossoms 16 

Light 17 

Survivals 18 

Once More the Pathetique 19 

Query to the Lord of Light 20 

The Explorer 21 

To THE Disembodied Intelligence 23 

A Spring Song for California 24 

Gramophone Solo 25 

. Versus 26 

A Stylist 27 

Revolutionaries 28 

Windless Rain 29 

Circular Fans 30 

Byzantine Mosaics 31 

Postponement 34 

Peace 35 

Suburban Twilight 37 

Announcing a Dissolution Sale 38 

Costa Scarpuccia 39 

Requiem 41 

Otherness 42 

To A Bivalve 43 

Marionettes 44 

Words 46 



JOSHUA TREES 



BLOOM ON THE DESERT'S EDGE 

DAWN inks in the saw-toothed foothills 
against its nickel glare; 
and, like the tail end of a flare, 
a handful of stars 

drag their light through the spikes of a Joshua tree 
and sink out of sight. 

Night flattens and thickens ; 
and noiselessly working, 
like a mind full of dreams, 
spectral exhalations 
wind with wool 
the acacias' fish-bone leaves. 

Time heaves 
and lies dead still 
an instant's eternity. 
Everything waits. 
Everything listens. 
Chill stillness fills 
everything 
like the shadow 
of a great wing. 

A patch of alkali glistens. 

And fiercely the sun clears the foothills 

and the sky is mercury 

hissing with mirage where it eats into the land, 

and the air is yellow with acacias in full bloom. 

Napoleon's thoughts before Jena must have come like this. 



[3] 



ARCHEOLOGY 

CANGRANDE, Gran Podestade di Verona, 
they have pried up the lid of your sarcophagus 
because it is now the sixth centenary 
of your shabby friend Dante — 
you remember? — 
him whom Florence deported 
and who said he had walked through Hell 
yet found your stairs so steep. 

And Cangrande you are a heap of musty rags 

to the camera's hard eye, 

a hunched muddle of rags and bones 

like the striker they potted on B Street, 

Tolusa, 

in a recent riot. . . . 

They photographed him too 

where he lay 

for the Sunday paper. 

And they have taken out of your hawklike right hand 

your long sword of state, 

all jewels and fine gold, 

and put it into a glass box 

with a brief exact label — 

name and date, 

length and weight. 

Ah, Cangrande di Verona, 
Grandissima Podestade! 



[41 



STILL LIFE 

TO withdraw impassive upon myself 
until the scattered beady quicksilver of thought, 
mingling, make my consciousness a mirror 
where all things will enter, but none remain; 

to assume my selfness completely 

by a contraction that envelops and yet rejects all 

otherness — 
this would be to become a flower. 
There is no other birth into perfection. 

Anemones, black-hearted paper-fine anemones, 

I have found this out 

seeing your white, purple, red 

reflected in the untroubled reality 

of a looking-glass. 

But what are you doing in this old bronze pot 

on my table? 

Your stems are as pale and sinuous as a shepherd's melody. 

Come, let us dance together; 

it is spring, and I have attended the obsequies 

of all my desires. 



|5I 



CONTACT 

A CRACKLING spark, 
ear-splitting, rips between the polished poles 
of your whining static machine, 
oscillating 
like a whipped rapier. 

So we have rushed upon one another 
licking through the dry tension of emotion. 

And the air stings and rings 
with the stimulation and clarity 
of ozone. 

We have rechemicalized 
the circumambient. 



[61 



VENETIAN GULLS 

TO-DAY they have come in from the sea, 
the pearl-grey gulls with white throats, white tails, 
and wings edged with frills of foam. 
The green canal water, 
harassed in its hunger for tranquillity 
by the worry and bubble of many oars and keels, 
lies fitted in between somnolent palaces 
like a finely chiseled pavement of Chinese jade. 
The hard oblique light falls clearer than flawless glass, 
cutting out pink roofs and high pink towers 
flat against the sky ; 

and, wheeling and skimming through it, 
on wings frilled with the white of foam, 
pearl-grey gulls fly 

in straining, ascending and descending spirals, 
over green water irised into its depths 
with reflections of crumbling brick 
and age-ivoried marble. 

Skimming, wheeling, wheeling, skimming, they fly 
over limpid jade-green water 
and its furling, unfurling, irised shadows 
that have rinsed out of the backward-slipping centuries 
insinuations of yellowing lace, 
purple figs, 
flaked gilt, 
pomegranates, 

and frost-flushed creeper leaves where summer still 
smoulders. 

The gulls fly 

in parabolas and hyperbolas, ellipses and cycloids, 

flapping hungrily 

with a peevish sharp cry. 



['T] 



They swirl, sweeping past empty round-arched windows, 

empty gothic windows, 

empty flamboyant windows, 

and the rusty iron-work and lank slimy seaweed 

of water gates. 

They swoop past rain- washed balustrades 
of porphyry balconies, 
squealing down on to floating shadows 
of delicate solemn palaces. 

Dangling their red feet 

they swoop and hover over inverted shadowy palaces 

that melt and spread like heavy oils 

on the canal's deep green. 

It is bitterly cold for early October 

and watching the gulls from my window 

I am filled with an imprisoned vague desolation. 

Hungry intentions swirl through me 

in petulant spirals 

and flapping hyperbolas — 

unattained projects driven in, at the year's end, 

from sea beaches of life 

that free and changing tides have swept clean. 

Improvident intentions veer about in me 

whirling whirring wings, 

as they settle down over lingering irised reflections in my 

mind 
of other men's delicate and solemn achievements. 

The flawless light of Autumn's reality stares 
at a world narrowed to a prison, 

under this high pearl-grey layer of unbroken clouds, 
where the gulls peevishly crying 
have come in famished from the sea. 

[8] 



THE MONKEY CAGE 

THE mind seeks liberation 
but seeking grasps tighter the bars of incarnation 
staring into the misty hypothesis, 
and reahty is a moment furtively lucid 
between dreams. 
(This is too technical.) 

* 'Please do not feed or annoy the animals." 

The mind seeks liberation, 

but few can make an exit unobserved, 

and the King of Dahomey 

has many spiritual relations 

who live in palaces of skulls. 

(This is too poetical.) 

Give me strength on this foggy morning, 

when all the pyramidal pines are as flat and flimsy 

as black and white drop-curtains easy to lunge through, 

and the live oaks, hugging one another, 

are immense toadstools 

black-purple on the blue mist 

— nothing to knock over; 

give me strength to make something 

out of the ice-cold iron I have been tugging at. 

Shall I twist it like a hairpin 

and make an instrument to measure a star? 

Shall I brain an enemy with it? 

Shall I flail out the seed of tribulation 

into penance and a slave's salvation? 

Or praise God on a vertical trapeze 

putting Swedish gymnastics into another dimension? 

The spectators in sleazy bowler hats — 
white mouths and goggle eyes, 

[9] 



like codfish nosing about a tank- 
gulp each other's excrement, 
and gleefully flap about 
admiring my captive nudity. 



[10] 



CALIFORNIA: THE HILLS OF BOLINAS 

WIND racing inland 
pawing the sea into creeping scallops — 
heavy-winged, galloping wind, 
half horse, half bird — 
you bound 

and bump against the drooping belly of the clouds, 
you stumble 
scrambling inland into the steep Sierra. 

And the yellow hills like heaps of half -empty balloons 

sag back from the beach in crumples, 

puff up in bulges, 

and shuddering drag at their moorings. 

Wind out of Asia, 

why are your feet so fierce upon these hills? — 

you who have come from the Harp-playing Defile 

and tawny Omei-shan, 

you who have spoken to the pines of Miajima 

and counted the yellow nets 

on the beach at Suruga? 



[11] 



CRUCIFIXION 

DISPASSIONATELY 
I spit my thoughts Hke flies on a pin 
because by their buzzing they keep reminding me 
it was love, without which nothing lives, 
imprisoned me here 

that I might know how beautiful and all-merciful love is 
and how nothing matters but love — 
me nailed up, as a joke, high between 
sparkling Virgo and Sagittarius 
with the steady leaking and waste of my days 
dripping like water 
on to my skull. 



[12] 



ARIZONA 

THESE wind-corroded mountains 
of malachite and steatite and azurite, 
of zinc and mica and feldspar, 
and dry as buried bones 
and arid as salt crystals in an oven — 
O holy land where nothing is that's holy, 
where nothing lives but mine prospectors' stakes, 
indulger and betrayer of passions 
withering and fierce as your suii. . . . 
Now grim John and his locusts are an unrolled scroll 

to me, 
and the Lamb of God, the Boddhi Tree and Mecca. 
Listen, there is something screaming 
like a scalded baby, 
listen, the desert jackal; 

and dawn whisks the crawling stars out of heaven 
like a scooping hand catching flies on an oil-cloth table. 

Lamb of God, 

1 am homesick, and men in their cities 
are less to me than tumble-weed 
bounding across the dry slime 

of dead lakes. 

The Lord will overwhelm their cities with sand ; 

the true God will bury their cities 

utterly. 

But the flute and the drum 

and the masked dance of His ritual shall endure. 

His revelation shall endure like the mica and feldspar 

of these wind-corroded mountains; 

and it shall not be for nothing 

that more a friendless exile 

than once in Galilee or Araby 

He tramps about this country. 



[13] 



REVULSION 

THIS afternoon 
my life came out of its lurking place 
underground, 

its two-mouthed gopher hole, 
and squeaked at me. 
Looking up, with its tiny eyes 
beady and spiteful, 
it winced, it squeaked at me. 

What am I? 

— the little, bare, rain-pitted mound 
nosed up at the mouth of its hole ? 

What am I? 

— the wind's erotic finger 
wound like an idiot girl's 
round a sun- stricken wild flower 
on its burrow's edge? 

Or the rotting rain 

splitting open the toadstool 

of my knowledge 

and leaving it stinking and yellow? 

But what does it matter what I think I am, 

or whether I made it 

or it made me, 

when my life has squeaked at me 

with spiteful eyes? 

I know, I know. ... 
It has nibbled in the dark 
the roots of bitter weeds. 
But then that is its nature. 

I'll go and make friends 
with the porcelain-faced odalisque 
who grins shoving out butter pats 
in Boos Bros.' cafeteria. 

[14] 



CUCKOOS 

PEOPLE of parchment in beautiful villas, 
your gardens' light and shade 
plays at chess with the sun; 
and on their own tails intent 
your peacocks parade 
down a lichened balustrade. 

Perennial flowers unfold 

hearing the grit of your feet 

on this gravel path. 

Your gardeners are very wise and old. 

But your villas' vaulted rooms' array 

and your crocuses and stocks 

are an aftermath 

of long ago and far-away 

that keeps you alive while it mocks. 

A warm wind rocks your fountain's jet 

yet you grow cold. 

Weary people of parchment 

with an eye, ringed round with wrinkles, 

that twinkles 

malicious hunger with itself at strife, 

once did it make your heart leap, 

this unfading beauty — 

once, when you paid for it with a sigh 

and turned your back on life, 

once, before years into many years had slipped 

by irretraceable degrees? 

You have made your nest 

in the remorseless eternity of beauty. 

I. . . . 

Ah, the seeds of a dream's perpetuity 

are too cheap 

in Italy 

for me. 

[15] 



QUINCE BLOSSOMS 

OUT of your leafless stem, 
five-petaled quince, 
your pistil a pearl, 
your stamens a little yellow sheaf, 
burst in perfection now the night 
that disimprisons you 
comes. 

I am weary of men and their folly 
and of my own folly, 
and my days are empty of elation, 
and my thoughts — I wince at them 
remembering them. 

Ah, but pure the delight 
with which I curl 
the caress of my eyes 
around your clusters, 
flower sudden as revelation 
and unearthly 
as second sight. 



[16] 



LIGHT 

LIKE a runner running over a starlit plain 
-^ breathless, with clenched hands, wildly, 
for fear of the sardonic quietness 
of the stars, 
when the wasted hills settling down into their deep 

composure 
whisper to one another, under the slow rotation of the sky, 
when the still night air is cold in his mouth. . . . 

Take not away from me, in my breathless running 
through the darkness with clenched fingers and bruised 

feet — 
take not from me, you smiling and scornful immensities, 
the agonizing light behind my blind eyes — 
take not away from me flight. 

Look! I am only a crazed runner 

running over a starlit plain 

wildly, aimlessly, with the cold of death in my mouth, 

running, running breathless through my own mania 

for fear of the sardonic quietness 

of your eternal stars. 



[17] 



SURVIVALS 

EVERYWHERE there is something hanging by a 
thread 
all over the world: 
bits of loose plaster caught, 
twisting with the wind in spiders' webs, 
high up on scaling old walls ; 

fruit, leaves, and seeds that would slip from their dry stems 
in the faintest stir of this deep-sleeping Autimin air; 
old houses that would crumble 
if you let a window slam ; 
old ships that would sink 
if a tired sea-gull lighted on their rail; 
cliffs that a beetle's pincers, nipping a spear of grass, 
would topple over into peaceful valleys; 
avalanches that wait to rumble down 
only the melting of one point 
of one snowflake's crushed six-pointed star; 
bodies, stiffening with death's stoniness, 
held up on a will to live 
over the grave; 

dead ideas, like stuffed birds on a rusty wire, 
all dust and rumpled feathers, 

still turning in some draughty hallway of the mind, 
simulating flight; 
the earth itself still counterpoised 
on its own dying spinning 
in space — 

all that absolving time in its hurry overlooks 
•everywhere lifelessly clinging to life, 
in the midst of death's 
luniversal tender loosening into peace. 



[18] 



ONCE MORE THE PATHETIQUE 

I LISTENED again, after years, to music 
that once like a sea wind 
blew clean the summits of my mind. 

I listened, 

cloudy with seasons of Himalayan mists 

sticking to the roof of my world, 

and oh so much more than ever 

in need of that revelation. 

But, wedged in among hundreds of faces, 
rows on thick expectant rows of them, 
I became a stone-cold Laocoon 
crawled over by the coiling and uncoiling 
of scaly sounds. 

Some one other than myself used my eyes to watch the 

conductor sweat. 
Some one other than myself was sickened by the breath 
of a much-moved woman behind me. 

And I ran up through an interminable black tunnel 
towards a tiny vent-hole of light. 

Curses on the multiplication table! 



[19] 



QUERY TO THE LORD OF LIGHT 

T^AINICHI, your hands clasped 

^^ in the gesture of the union 

of mortahty with the infinite, 

making the symbol of the five senses 

closing upon wisdom 

clearer than the heart of a diamond. . . . 

Dainichi, light of the world, 

the gilt flakes off 

your golden body; 

flake by flake it chips off 

and falls into the stone-rimmed pool 

below your altar. 

And the gold fish wake out of their cold dreams ; 

they think they see the wings of a dead butterfly ; 

they dart upon them like streaks of sunlight ; 

they fight about the flakes 

of the bright body 

of your immeasurable wisdom; 

and their churning tails 

leave tiny eddies and ripples 

on the pool. 

O Illuminator, 

how comes the phantom of hunger 

to lurk so untamed in the shadow of your light? 



[20] 



THE EXPLORER 

HIS brittle hands let a pale rosiness 
through from the fire as he passed them over his 
white beard, 
and the skin on his skull 
over a puckered bushiness of brows 
brought back to me the feeling of an ivory 
I have often had in my hands — a stained figure 
of a Christ caressed by who will ever say 
how many lips. 

So when he told me how he explored alone 

Lake Nyassa a long, long lifetime ago, 

scaling the snow-capped chain of Marununga's peaks 

that stand around it 

and plunge toothed shadows 

into the sun-devoured gold 

of its rippleless immensity, 

I no longer felt he was sitting there, 

fragile and old beside me. 

I only heard his quiet voice. 

And through my mind 

lithe black men, nude, bronze-glossy, full of held-in 

swiftness, 
crawled on all fours, with big white watchful eyes, 
through mango thickets, 
beyond Ayanga and Makanga, 
serpent-wise, in fear of cruel gods, 
cruel chiefs, cruel enemies. 
And deep behind my eyes 
clusters of blooms, obscenely poisonous, 
hung from a woven dome of mulando boughs, 
strangled and stifling with the stench of decay. 

I saw blue-faced baboons with scarlet buttocks 
and lecherous tails 
slinking through silver reeds 

[21] 



in the heron-haunted Morambala marshes; 

and luridly, through the listless air — 

green, red, black, yellow, strident streaks they seemed — 

great birds 

screamed over me, settling like gossamer 

down the livid half-light 

on gorgeous, unfluttered, outspread plumes. 

I felt the crushing sun's heat 

on a thatch of swamp -fattened leaves, 

while the jungle snapped and shivered 

at something squirming its way 

down to the molten gold of the lake. 

And through it all I kept hearing drums of ebony beating 

through a steady throb of beaten drums beating 

through a thick, ecstatic pulse of deeper drums, 

while an unsteady flute 

spilled, like a rivulet of sulphur creeping through the dark, 

a trickle of gasping melody 

that turned upon itself and coiled and suddenly set free 

a shuffling of soft feet 

and wriggle of bare flesh 

and jiggle of black breasts 

in rites more ancient than the jungle is. 

Till on the tum-tum, tum-tum-tum, 

and unending flicker of the flute 

I felt the jeweled pinion of my brain, 

on which my thoughts revolve, 

spin into giddiness. 

For there was something, behind me, beside me, above me, 

so soaked and soaked again and steaming 

with life, 

something so dark and teeming with existence 

that the naked black men's naked fear 

put its damp fingers into my heart. . . . 

Then looking up I saw him stroking in a revery 
his white beard 

and speaking like one who has forgotten that he speaks. 

[ 22 ] 



TO THE DISEMBODIED INTELLIGENCE 

/^H quickly 

^^ out of your polar seclusion 

where, by spinning on your heel scornfully, 

you have often reversed the motion of the stars . . . 

quickly — 

this cane-brake is swarming with lascivious pigmies. 

I have known in what nothingness consists. 

Obliterate my apartness 

in the benediction 

of your basilisk eyes. 

There can be between us now 

no side considerations, 

no vicious charity. 

What if once I did stupidly think 

there was a secret kinship 

between myself 

and forgotten idols? 



[23] 



A SPRING SONG FOR CALIFORNIA 

A TOMTIT'S cheep, addressed 
-^^ to the gurgle of the creek, 
flits sharp as a httle crotchet's hook 
jotted carelessly oblique 
in a new blank-book. 
This season's pullets have begun to sit. 
The gruntings of a saxophone 
intone with unregarding glee 
someone's opulent vacuity 
too long suppressed. 
A punted football's twirls 
loop up and droop 
into a crook'd arm. 
The sunshine is blue as an arc light, 
and the swirls of the hill's edge through it 
delight 
even me. 

Now moment after moment limpidly laps against me 
like a warm ripple and yields 

gayly 

its tether on eternity 

to another. 

A violent cyclamen stares 

in a red pot. 

The marble clouds pile up 

and file away behind the trees 

complacently. 

The rains have passed 

like naked girls 

running at dawn over fallow fields. 

The ground is soft as a cheese to spade 

and bursting buds shake a cannonade 

over ants gone mad on their army affairs, 

while local architects swing and smile 

in swivel chairs. 

[24] 



GRAMOPHONE SOLO 

FINGERING a tune on my clarionet 
I burned a village of wooden shacks — 
these melodious attacks 
are more insidious than they seem. 

Yet people look for lightning in their music — 
the flash that will short-circuit their emotions 
through me! 
Then they go shouting, "Firebug! Firebug!" 

Engine of our inspiration 

(And how like a thing beset 

it spins 

fearfully ; 

look, and the spark of it 

how it skims and skips!), 

engine, before your hum 

acts like a drug 

and still more mixed our metaphors become, 

intimate, intimate to me 

what makes you make me squeeze a melody 

through the tube of a clarionet 

and hold it like elixir to their lips 

when where it drips it burns — 

since fire is the liquid of the voice of any bird 

and crematory to the common herd? 



[25] 



. VERSUS . 

ELECTION Day. 
The sky-blue plumbago basks, 
a motionless wave of bloom, 
under this dry exhilarating 
California sun. 

Ford cars, buzzing like clocks 

that have lost their balance-wheels, 

deliver eggplants, 

polished and purple, 

and white ranch eggs stuck in cardboard pigeon-holes. 

A gramophone grits its teeth over a jazz. 

Crack ! 

They are playing baseball in the lot next door. 

Election Day ! 

And which shape of straw 

will the befuddled giant choose this time 

to jiggle on jocose thumb at his puppet-show, 

while Europe, in her dotage, 

looks up, incredulous, lacrymose. 

expecting — 

surely not another Messiah! 

Election Day. 

My newspaper crinkles and smells like a sawmill 
as, open-mouthed, I skim over the last exhortations 
of frantic and unselfish candidates. 

Crack! 

They are playing ball in the lot next door — 
J, ea-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ay 
Surely not already the Messiah! 

The plumbago basks in the still sun, 
scentless and sky-blue. 

[26] 



A STYLIST 

SELF-SUFFICIENT and shut in upon myself 
I thought I could hold words on to the grindstone 
of my imagination, 
so firm, so long, 

that with the fine edge of their subtlety 
I could, when the moment came, 
chip imperishable figures 
out of the unquarried ledges of my life. 

How many years have been sucked up 

into my stone's whirling 

and lost in the gush of its winking sparks! 

How many years — 

while the shapes I was going to chisel 

have faded out of my mind. 

Faded completely. 

And now I have it in my hands, 

this whetted instrument, 

what am I to do with it 

hacking and hewing at shadows 

that mocking 

hack and hew at me? 

Ouf, the cliff sculptures of Tibet and China! 



[27] 



REVOLUTIONARIES 

T^O bring down suddenly and utterly, 
-■" as an earthquake would, the rotting edifice 
where Faith has been walled up in incest with the shadow 

of her fear 
for centuries and centuries, 

to burn the rags of Faith's diseases and her rusty irons 
in a vision's smokeless flame — ^this was their dream, 
when Thought (who knew the purging of his parents' 

incest 
would make a beggar of him on the public streets) 
in their ear 

whispered a syllable that gave again to their mortal eyes 
a pregnant sight . . . 
while treacherously caressing the wayward flower-flame 

of their vision 
he tore loose from eternity 
the slim deep roots of its light. 



[28] 



WINDLESS RAIN 

RAIN at dawn on the tiles of Venice, 
' a soft straight steady shpping down of rain; 
water mistily passing into water 
with a diffused hush. 
Not another sound in the city, 

no lapping of waves, no knocking together of boats. 
Everything sleeping. 

I look out and watch the rain, 

until the silence of the low misty clouds 

and the silence of the sleeping city, 

and the inner silence into which all my thoughts have been 

sucked up 
cling to one another 
with the chill caressing gesture 
of the Three Graces, 
the delicate Lesbian goddesses 
of the cathedral library of dry Siena. 
I see them projected from the magic lantern of my mind 
against the impalpable unbroken 
background of the rain. ... 

Mesmerizing sound of rain on canal water — 

There is a shadowless beginning of light now 

everywhere ; 

but at the corner of Calle Lanza and Calle San Gregorio 

lamplight is yellow still on grey walls. 



[29] 



CIRCULAR FANS 

THE perimeters of the minds of most people, 
how quickly you can measure them ! — 
two carved or painted little sticks 
of environment and heredity 
laid face to face, 

and when with the bright smile of an idea 
you open them, 

turning them through their full orbit, 
when carefully laying them back to back 
you fasten the gilt clasp of their prejudice, 
there outspread, the pleated complete circle of their 

intelligence : 
a low moon scratched across by river reeds perhaps ; 
a humble doorway into daily tribulations ; 
some emblematic holy figure. . . . 

Fan yourself! 

How will you ever 

stir otherwise this torpid air? 



[30] 



BYZANTINE MOSAICS 

GESTICULATION and laughter and bombardment 
of flowers 
beside this deep blue sea, 
under this deep sea-blue sky. 

The chattering crowd falls greedily on its moment — 
the living promiscuous crowd living out its living desires. 
It is the feast of the Most Holy and Immaculate Virgin, 
the compassionate, the interceding. 

The swirling frivolity of thousands of faces 

gurgles around me 

lapping into my eyes with bright provocative ripples. 

But, turned in upon myself, 

I remember 

that, in the twilight of crumbling apses, 

I have seen recognition 

in fixed inhuman eyes 

and something invisible to others 

pass over their expression 

as I have gazed up at half-obliterated figures 

tall and very frail and loaded down 

with all the sapphires and emeralds 

of imperial treasuries. 

Ascetic and cruel and cadaverous women 

cancerous with defeat and an empire's decrepitude, 

insane and exquisite and inquisitive women 

silent with the poison of an impassive voluptuousness 

and full of ruinous understanding, 

we have understood one another 

without intercession or compassion. 

And how should I not be a stranger at flower festivals 

among these children of barbarians, 

when in my mind you linger 



[31] 



enduring without a gesture 

the gleaming functions 

and tedious last rites 

of plague-depopulated capitols? 

The obscurity and falling away of dead time 

is bridgeless between us. 

And you will never come back again to this impoverished 

world 
where only paltry and tawdry counterfeits, 
like these tinseled village girls made up as queens, 
enthroned while the procession lasts 
from city gate to city gate, 
parade 
in pasteboard cars of triumph. 

I have looked into your great fixed eyes 

and seen the end of life like a little light 

floating far-off on the edge of the sea at night. 

You have turned upon yourselves 

and, cold and distracted, you watch 

your erudite and sycophantic priests 

move imperturbable through yet another incense-stifled 

cycle 
of senseless ritual, 
while Scythians and Bulgarians 
paw at the gates. 
O frail and pitiless and aching 
under your crushing, 
gem-encrusted tunics, 
we have understood one another; 
we are heavy and helpless with understanding. 

And yet a worm of envy works his file-like tongue 
on the quick of me. 

To feel my heart flutter up 
with exaltation like a peasant boy's 

[ 32 ] 



watching his love as queen of the festival 

ride by 

billowy with mosquito net 

and drawn by plodding plough horses! 

Or to jeer and be full of the joy of jeering 

familiar, thoughtless, unwounding, 

like these village people 

when she kisses her hands at them 

with the jerky movement of a manikin. 



[33] 



POSTPONEMENT 

T^HROUGH the rock crystal of my silence 
-■■ run silver flaws; 
unsung songs beating against it 
have cracked with fine fissures the globe of my silence, 
and the knife-thin ray of inner light 
with which I probe into the future 
splinters along them into ghostly spectra. 

If only I had put out my hand 

when they flew hard into the deceiving crystal, 

as bewildered birds fly into the light, 

I should not now, in this darkness, 

be wrapped and wrapped, 

like an unrisen Lazarus, 

in all these swathing ribbons of rainbows. 



[34 1 



PEACE 

COME, my own, let us steep ourselves in beauty, 
for in the world no sacrifice avails, 
no purity avails or holiness. 

They walked in the flame of death as into sunlight, 

and they made themselves for others the inner flame of 

life— 
they are dead and the names of them, who will remember ? 

They have fallen among obscene shadows that have 

quenched 
the burning of their vision, 

shadows piled up, ages deep, by dead lust, dead greed, 
around them dead and around us living, 
shadows full of insatiable teeth and padded paws that 

prowl, 
betrayals, trafficking, plottings, money-changing. 

The beasts of the thickets of money and power — 
they have bartered the ashes of their bones, 
they have sold their unnameable martyrdom and passion, 
they have traded in the divine trance of their utter devotion, 
they have made of their death a trap with which to way- 
lay us. 

Come, my own, let us steep ourselves in beauty, 

for it alone has in it no root of corruption, 

for it alone is consolation; 

be it only the resonance fallen mysteriously on a word, 

the morning's unfolding 

or the night's restoring transfigurations, 

the laughter of a child, the singing of a bird, the quiver of 

a leaf — 
be it only this tragic and imprisoned and tumultuous 
heart of yours, 
or be it only now at last, 

[35] 



only the tender gesture of understanding, 

long lacking, 

with which I look into your mind, 

and you look deep down into mine and bring me peace. 



[36] 



SUBURBAN TWILIGHT 

IN'TO the thickening dusk 
I carried the dusk of my alien mind. 
Silence congealed on the cement sidewalks 
speculators have scratched across empty fields. 
Here and there a human fly 
buzzed in a ready-made house. 

The sign posts were as meaningless and askew 

as my thoughts — 

"Paradise Point, Tract P 3, Panoramic Way." 

This, I said, is an iniquity of drawing paper and India ink, 

a calculation, 

a diagram, 

a zoological garden of logic and lust. 

The silence was like a blue jelly 

and, as I walked, it quivered into a blear piping, 

a shrill throbbing. 

It was as if all the memories of my childhood 
sitting around the puddle of unconsciousness, 
began whimpering. 

I listened, thinking to myself, "At least there still are 

frogs." 
Then I passed a popcorn peddler's cart, 
and the little whisk of steam from his whistle, 
spiffling drearily, 
blew away white into the unlighted night. 



[37] 



ANNOUNCING A DISSOLUTION SALE 

^'DEATITUDE. 
•■^ This article goes to the bargain counter 
Friday. 

A limited supply from our own agent 
in the Elysian Fields. 

Assorted. Guaranteed. First come, first served. 
No orders C. O. D. will be received. 
100,000,000 samples have been sold. 
The price is right and cut down to the quick. 
Sacrifice! 

These goods for while they last. 
Our motto -monogram on every package: 
'To him that hath.' 
Shop early. Bring your friends." 

(Galvanic arms and hands 
knock over the salesmen 
waving paper money 
sticky with sweat and blood. 
The cash register chokes.) 

I put my face against the plate-glass door, 
but seeing the exaltation of the mob 
I saunter to a graveyard that I know 
to hum love-songs and study epitaphs, 
(This form of piety repays a rhetorician.) 
while dandelions, sprinkled through the grass, 
make mimic maps 
of prehistoric heavens. 



[38] 



COSTA SCARPUCCIA 

THROUGH the lit mist 
that flows low under the night sky 
like a silver dust-cloud over the city, 
nine orange lights on an unseen hill — 
nine orange street lamps of Fiesole 
alive with a faint twinkling in the black stillness 
mimicking the constellation of Cassiopeia setting. 

I carry my mind like a falcon asleep on my wrist, 

and it does not peel the thin wrinkled skin from its 

eye 
as I wander down the steep flagged gorge of this silent 

old street. 
Like a falcon chained with a fine gold chain 
my mind sleeps, drooping its predatory wings. 

And, fearless of startling it into flight, 

I look up and see 

all the thoughts and desires, like my own, that have made 

men make the city, 
hewing it, year in year out, day in day out, with weary 

chisels 
out of cold stones, 

carving it slowly in the image of their fate 
enfeoffed to the cruel wings of their dreams. 

I look up and see, 

under the nine far-away orange street lamps of Fiesole 

laid against the hill like Cassiopeia setting, 

the everliving races of the birds of divination and 

hope 
where they sit in a brooding rookery 
on the edge of shadows that hang from jutting roofs 
of banks, shops, bureaus, hotels, houses — 
bald, old vultures with hunched-up, shoulder bones, 
and hoary, bedraggled owls, 

[39] 



and ruffled, river-haunting cranes — 

their claws clenched tight on rain-smoothed cornice gutters, 

their beaks thrust under their wings. 

I look up and see them 

and my falcon mind sinks its talons deep into my wrist. 



[40] 



REQUIEM 

The birth of an essentially American art is momentarily expected. — Radio 
Broadcast. 

IARYA in a steel-blue crevice 
-^ under hills of ice, 
strange speck-embodied pain of coming wings too delicate 
for flight, 
insect, 

why are you trying to be born 
in this Switzerland not garnished yet 
with lepidopterists ? 

I see by your feeble pulsations 

you feel a lost ray of the sun 

come crawling 

over the glacier of recorded fact. 

Ah, but will nothing 

reverse the useless cycle of your fated becoming? 

This shadowy dawn is fallacious. 

Already as a worm 

(much less as painted death-moth 

or ghostly dragon-moth) 

you are too . . . old! 



[41] 



OTHERNESS 

T T is so silent here I cannot think. 
-■• An oak leaf's clicking fall 
denudes my mind of continuity ; 
and the ringlet waves of putting 
the twos and twos of life together 
lap backwards over one another 
and die out into this silence 
like a wind's breath 
held in over a pool. 
I see the crooked image of a bough, 
the flickering of a butterfly; 
and bending nearer over myself 
I put my face down 
and feel the chill of otherness 
creep over my eyes. 



[42] 



TO A BIVALVE 

CREATURE of accretions, 
at noon, under the sea water's pale-green half night, 

half day, 
grain by grain 

you are making for yourself a wall of rainbows 
secretly out of the dark, swaying sea. 
Yet what can you know of fabulous signs and promises 
arched red, purple, blue, 
binding sudden rifts of serene sky 
to the scudding foam — 
you, when the foot of their arch is set on the edges of the 

world, 
you 

— bubbles, 
a little, wobbling, up -striving stream 
black over, silver under, 
the breadth of your mouth? 

Turn inward your dreams, O my spirit. 
Let the inside even of your rebellion be a rainbow 
better to you than many-colored, far-away, 
false hopes. 

Look, these millions of upturned faces 
distorted with anguish 
— waiting for the miracle! 
Look, these millions of fixed eyes 
ashen with disillusion! 



[43] 



MARIONETTES 

At the sun-silvered far end of the empty square, 
-^"^ their backs to me, they walk side by side, 
shoulders and hips just touching; 
they are both in black, 
and her slanted bright parasol 
covers their inclined heads 
like a little green dome. 

I see them stop, 

and his arm, extended in its black sleeve 

ending in a white hand, 

makes twice 

a gesture, an appeal. 

They walk on again 

crossing a blue polygon of shadow 

fallen askew from the grey corroded front 

of an ancient church. 

They loiter 

where the joints of the flags of the sun-silvered square 

converge. 

I do not know who they are, 

and from my window they seem now 

hardly an inch high. 

Yet in the clear depths of my introspection 

I see, sharp from their feet, diverging beyond them 

far out, year behind year, 

a crowded perspective 

interpenetrating like a diorama 

the sunny walls of the old square's houses. 

Something has dropped out of eternity into time. 

And I feel the shimmering waters of their trance 
suck me under 

[ 44 ] 



into a stillness where the stars are lit at midday. 

They saunter on again. 

No wonder her tilted parasol 

is shot with the dye 

of spring's unfolding tenderest leaves. 



[45] 



WORDS 

FROM high up among interwoven branches 
that make black rivers against my mind's moonhght, 
words let go of their chilled twigs 
and spinning drift downward 
through the inner stillness of my meditation. 

And they are miraculous words 
like the words of incantations. 

What can they ever be to me these heaps of leaves 

the keepers of gardens and graves 

have raked up crinkling beside the crowded highway? 

Would I be a wind to blow them into the pitiable faces 

of hurrying travelers ? 

Would I stoop with the flame of a match to set them 

smouldering 
for the sake of the blue-white column of smoke 
rooted in their decay and twisting like a waterspout 
into the clouds? 

Would I dim the eyes of those who do not see 

the end of their journey 

with the gusty eddies and rustle of prophecy? 

Would I deceive these crawling convoys creaking through 

the desert 
from one bondage into another 
with a pillar of smoke? 

The flash and hurrying clamor of the highway ; 

the unceasing rumble of its wheels ; 

the unresting pattering and shuffle of feet ; 

and out of the moonlit silver plains and black rivers of 

my mind, 
sifting downward through the sacred stillness 
of my meditation, 
magic unavailing words. 

[46] 



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